Trilby

“You’d have known sooner if you’d ever agreed to come out with your father and brother,” he chided.

“I eat enough dust in the house, thank you, without going out in search of more during roundup,” she replied.

“Dust won’t melt you, sugar plum,” he said, with faint sarcasm.

“I hardly expected that it would, and please, could you refrain from calling me pet names?”

He turned in the seat to face her, idly rolling a cigarette while he stared at her. There were only the two of them in the world, in this beautiful wild place. Trilby was intensely aware of him as a man and was fighting not to respond to him. It was very easy to remember how it had been when he’d kissed her the night before. She was much too vulnerable to him, and he had a bad opinion of her. She must remember that, somehow. Her posture straightened as she fought not to betray the tingling excitement he engendered in her.

But he saw her discomfort and understood it very well. “You’re very stiff and formal with me, Trilby. Why?”

She met his searching gaze bravely. “It isn’t me that you’re interested in, Mr. Vance,” she said shortly. “I’m not completely stupid.”

She surprised him. That didn’t often happen with women. Sally had been pretty, but not particularly intelligent. Trilby was. “Then if I’m not interested in you, what am I interested in?”

“The water on my father’s property,” she said, without backing down.

He smiled appreciatively. “Well, well. And what makes you think that?”

“You need water. You don’t have enough, and we do, and my father won’t sell or lease any to you. That’s why,” she replied. “My father doesn’t even suspect that you might be playing up to me for ulterior motives. He thinks the sun rises and sets on you. So does the rest of my family.” She glared at him. “For myself, Mr. Vance, I think you’re a shipless pirate.”

He chuckled softly. “Well, that’s honest, at least.” He stuck the rolled cigarette in his thin mouth and produced a match to light it. Pungent smoke filled the air.

“I don’t really blame you,” she said after a minute. She fumbled with her cloth drawstring purse. “I suppose water is life itself out here.”

“Indeed it is.” He took another draw from the cigarette. “Are you up to a little walking?”

“Of course,” she said, glad to escape the confined space.

He came around and opened her door, carefully helping her out. The touch of his fingers made her heart jump. She moved quickly away from him and began to walk down the road. It was so peaceful. The wind blew noisily and there was a smell, a crisp, earthy smell, in the air. Her eyes found rock formations in the hills beyond. The trees were golden and magnificent against the faint reddish yellow of the maple leaves.

“What sort of trees are those?” she asked curiously.

“The golden ones? They’re paloverde trees. They have long strands of golden blossoms in the spring, and in the autumn they go glorious. I like them better than the maples.”

“Those others are oaks, aren’t they?”

“Some of them. That—” he indicated an enormous tree with a bent trunk “—is a cottonwood. A few decades ago, people used to strip off the bark and scrape the tree for sap. It’s sweet, you see, like a confection.”

“Oh,” she cried delightedly, “how clever!”

“And those are willows,” he added, gesturing toward a stand of sapling-type trees along the banks of the stream.

She looked around suddenly. “Is it safe here?” she asked quickly. “I mean, are there Indians near here?”

He smiled. “Plenty of them. Mostly Mescalero and Mimbrenos Apaches. There used to be a wealth of Chiricahuas, but when Geronimo was captured, the government shipped his whole band back East to Florida and kept them in a fort on the bay at St. Augustine for a long time. They finally moved them back out to New Mexico. Geronimo killed a lot of white people, but then, the white people killed a lot of Apaches, too. Gen. George Crook finally got him to surrender. Quite a fellow, old Nantan Lupan.”

“What?”

“Grey Wolf. It’s what the Apaches called Crook. They respected him. When he gave his word, he kept it. Odd for a white man. He did all he could to help the Apaches for the rest of his life, after Geronimo’s surrender. Geronimo died February of last year.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He glanced at her. “You Easterners don’t know much about Indians, do you? Apaches are interesting. They called the old Chiricahua chief Cochise, but his Apache name was Cheis. It means oak. God only knows how it got altered to Cochise. He was a wily old devil, smart as a fox. He led the U.S. Cavalry on a merry chase until the peace came. But Geronimo refused to give up and live at the white man’s mercy on a reservation. There were times, not so long ago, when just the name Apache could make a grown man tremble out here.”

She kept quiet, waiting for him to go on. She was fascinated with his knowledge of the Indians.

He smiled, sensing her interest. That pleased him. “Indians are not ignorant. I have two Apache men who work for me. One of them is Chiricahua. And he is,” he added dryly, “hardly the Eastern image of an Indian. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him. His name is Naki.”

“What does it mean?” she asked curiously.

“He’s actually called Two Fists, but Apache has glottal stops and nasalizations and high tones…I can’t pronounce his second name. Naki means ‘two.’”

“Are you…do you have any Indian blood?”

He shook his head. “My grandmother was a pretty little Spanish lady. They had a little girl. My grandfather got tired of the responsibility and deserted her.” He let that slip. He’d never told anyone else.

“Didn’t he love her enough to stay?”

He grew stiff. “Apparently not. My grandmother starved to death. If it hadn’t been for my great-uncle, the one who owned Los Santos, my mother would have starved, too. She and my father inherited Los Santos when my great-uncle died. I was eighteen when Mexicans raided up here and killed them.”

“Did you have brothers or sisters?”

“I was one of three kids; I had two sisters,” he said. “They both died of cholera.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was just a kid at the time. I don’t remember much about them.” He smoked his cigarette as they walked, his head high. He walked without stooping, his posture perfect, like his clothing. For a cowboy, he wore the suit very well.

“You said your grandmother was Spanish…”

“And you wonder why Mexicans attacked her daughter and son-in-law,” he guessed.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you know yet that most Mexicans hate the Spanish? It’s one of the reasons they’re fighting now. They’ve had Spanish domination since Cortés. They’ve had enough,” he replied simply. “But the people who killed my parents weren’t revolutionaries. They were just bandits.”

“I’m sorry. About your parents, I mean.”

“So was I.”

There was a wealth of pain in the words, and she remembered reluctantly how his expression had told her he dealt with the murderers. She turned her attention to the ground, looking at the sandy soil. “Does much grow out here?” she asked idly.

“The Hohokam, the Indian people who once inhabited this land before the time of Christ, were an agricultural people. They learned to grow corn in clumps, and to irrigate the land. They had a system of government and a religion that was far ahead of their time. They may have existed as a culture for thousands of years.”

She stared at him with renewed respect. “How do you know all that?”

He chuckled. “McCollum,” he said simply. “It pays to have an anthropology professor for a friend. He’s very good at his job. He stays with me when he’s exploring ruins in the area. He comes several times a year when he’s teaching.”